So I am finally getting around to updating my resume in Chinese and have run into this problem…are there standard names as to how the name of a university and type of degrees should be translated? How am I supposed to do the proper Chinese characters for colleges, majors, and degree types? Is there a difference, in Chinese, between a BS/BA or MA/MS/MBA/MEd/MPH/MSW/MEng/MPhil, etc?
How are they supposed to be translated properly so people will not think I am just pulling stuff out of my arse and randomly making up my qualifications?
It’s easy to find the “standard” name if there is one widely used.
Go to Google. Enter the English name of the university followed by a space and the Chinese characters “DaxuE” (大學). This will bring up pages in either English or Chinese which contain both together (as well as other pages that won’t help, but mostly you’ll get both the English and Chinese name of the university together that way, since the Chinese have the habit of putting both of them into a sentence many times.)
You may want to limit your search to .tw domains since that way you’ll get transliterations that are more “acceptable” to Taiwanese ears. Sometimes the specific characters used to transliterate Western names can vary between Taiwan and the Mainland.
You can check Chinese translations of the various degrees in the same way, although I would simply put the degree awarded as it appears (using the English abbreviation) since those are common usage in Taiwan as well. If you doubt that someone would recognize that an M.Phil is a Master’s degree, put “碩士” in Chinese and use the full English designation for the specific degree. Most times it won’t matter anyway, really, as long as they know it’s a Master’s level qualification.